IN JANUARY 1996, on a blindingly bright day after a snowfall so heavy I could barely beat a path to the front door, I drove with a leasing agent to view a large reddish-brown house on Zena Road, a mile east of Woodstock’s village green. Set back from a hairpin bend that hugged the Sawkill River, the house—formerly home to Surrealist painter Dimitri Petrov—was a sprawling barn of a place with giant windows and a vast backyard. Since I urgently needed to find a home for my young family, I said I would take it.
Only when I had been living in the house for some months did I learn—from former Band producer John Simon—that a similarly reddish-brown property sitting immediately below us was the house Rick Danko had once lived in with his first wife, Grace, and where Elliott Landy had shot dozens of photographs of the Band. I’d pored over those pictures on the inside sleeve of the group’s second album, and now every morning I was looking down at the very rooms where they’d been taken.**
And then, in Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler USA—published the year of my move to Woodstock—I read that “the most commonly quoted crash site is on a very sharp bend about a mile up Zena Road near an old barn.” Had I unwittingly picked the spot where Bob Dylan was thrown off his motorcycle?
BY THE TIME he was home in June 1966, the strain on Dylan had become too much. Exhausted by four months of almost nonstop touring, he returned to Byrdcliffe to recuperate, only to find new pressures building up. Albert Grossman had scheduled another run of North American concerts for the fall. ABC television had bought rights to a film from Pennebaker’s footage of the European tour. Macmillan was gearing up to publish Dylan’s “novel” Tarantula.
Photographs of the ghostly pale singer in the woods in July make clear just how wrecked he was. “[This] was the time that he was most caressed and possessed by the various drugs that he was taking,” said Carly Simon, then briefly being managed by Grossman. “The effects on him were that he was pretty displaced.” Simon had seen Dylan just a week before his accident, when “he seemed like he was very high on speed: very, very wasted and talking incoherently, saying a lot about God and Jesus.” When painter Brice Marden came to a party at Dylan’s Chelsea Hotel suite, the singer was lying “comatose” in the middle of the sitting room and was still unconscious when Mick Jagger arrived.
Back in Woodstock one night, Dylan looked up at the moon shining over the mountains, and a voice spoke in his head. “Something’s gotta change,” it said. Suddenly Columbia, ABC, and Macmillan were just “leeches” trying to bleed him dry. Meanwhile he had a loving wife who only wanted him home.
For the better part of two months, Dylan did his best just to function. He pieced together fragments of Donn Pennebaker’s footage with the help of Bobby Neuwirth and Howard Alk, who’d once worked for Grossman in Chicago. After Grossman berated him for “not helping Bob enough,” Pennebaker himself came up to Bearsville. “Sally would make lunch for us,” he says. “There was a lot of angst about the film. Bob was much less comfortable with me than he’d been on Don’t Look Back. He asked Neuwirth and me to put something together so we had something to show ABC.”**
If Dylan was attempting to moderate his intake of drugs, Alk was hardly the most sensible person to be working with. “He was a very political guy but a completely drugged degenerate,” says Peter Coyote. “It was a very crazy scene: a lot of drugs and a lot of madness.” On the other hand, Alk was not a hanger-on, which was refreshing to anyone turned off by the Grossmans’ airs. “There was a culture around them that sort of rewarded pretentiousness, but Howard was not like that at all,” says Danny Goldberg, who worked for Grossman at the end of the decade. “He was just a teddy bear of a guy without a scintilla of arrogance or snobbery.” Pennebaker saw Alk as “a kind of lifeguard” for Dylan, who was drowning under the demands of ABC, Macmillan, and Grossman himself.
Dylan told Al Aronowitz that he’d been up for three days straight on speed when, early on Friday, July 29, he set off from the Grossmans’ home on his Triumph 500, Sara following close behind in their Ford station wagon. From Dylan’s description of what happened, he must have ridden the bike north up Striebel Road and then turned right on Glasco Turnpike. (He almost certainly didn’t get as far as Zena Road, whatever Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler USA surmised.) The fullest account of the accident comes from a one-act play that Sam Shepard based on a 1987 conversation with Dylan. “I was driving right into the sun,” Dylan said—or so we must assume—“and I looked up into it, even though I remember someone telling me a long time ago when I was a kid never to look straight at the sun ’cause you’ll get blinded . . . and, sure enough, I went blind for a second and I kind of panicked or something. I stomped down on the brake and the rear wheel locked up on me and I went flyin’.”
Sally Grossman was on the phone to her husband when Dylan set off. She was still talking to Albert when the station wagon reappeared in the driveway. She saw Dylan almost fall out of the passenger seat and collapse onto the porch, clearly in pain though not injured enough for anyone to call an ambulance. Sally returned to the phone to tell Albert what had happened. Sara then drove Dylan down to Middletown, an hour southeast of Woodstock, and left him in the care of Dr. Ed Thaler. “It was away from his ordinary life,” said Thaler’s wife, Selma, “and I think that provided some peace of mind.” Another of Grossman’s clients, Odetta, came to see the doctor and was astonished to find Dylan occupying almost the entire third floor of the house.
The fact that Dylan stayed with the Thalers for at least ten days hints at what many suspect: either he needed to detox from whatever drugs he’d been taking, or he was suffering a total breakdown. (Or both.) Either way it gave him a perfect out. The upcoming tour, a week away, was cancelled. The film and novel were put on hold. For a few days Dylan lay in bed and stared out of the window, feeling relief that he could simply stop. “I just remember how bad I wanted to see my kids,” he said in Sam Shepard’s dialogue. “I started thinkin’ about the short life of trouble. How short life is. I’d just lay there listenin’ to birds chirping. Kids playing in the neighbor’s yard or rain falling by the window. I realized how much I’d missed. Then I’d hear the fire engine roar, and I could feel the steady thrust of death that had been constantly looking over its shoulder at me.”
Dylan was back at Hi Lo Ha by mid-August, when Allen Ginsberg visited with a trunkload of books for the younger man to read as he recovered. “This accident may have been a good thing,” the poet told the World Journal Tribune in October. “It’s forced him to slow down.” Other visitors reported that Dylan was in a neck brace but seemed mobile. Rick Danko told me the accident was “serious enough that it took him a year or so to get himself back together,”** but Al Aronowitz thought the brace looked like “a prop,” and Al Kooper says that “if he’d had a serious accident, I would have known more at the time.” In Grossman’s office, Myra Friedman issued a press release that failed to quell rumors that Dylan had been maimed or disfigured. His own parents couldn’t get any definitive word on what had happened.
For Dylan himself, the only thing that mattered was that he’d bought some time to step back from the madness of his career. “He was trying very hard to escape that really crazy thing you see in Don’t Look Back,” says Happy Traum, who spent that summer in Woodstock and, in his own words, “became kind of injected into the cauldron of people” around Dylan and Grossman. “It was getting out of control, and this was his way of reining everything in and just saying, ‘I’ve got to get a normal life here, and the only way I can do that is to shut everybody else out.’”
For the remainder of the year Dylan did very little, even as he worked at Bearsville on the film for ABC. “He didn’t know anything more about directing than I did, so the two of us were just sort of mucking around with this material,” says Donn Pennebaker. Dylan may not have written a single song before the turn of the year. He told Newsweek that he’d “stared at the ceiling for a few months,” adding that he was “a country boy myself, and you have to be let alone to really accomplish anything.”
Most mornings Jesse woke his parents, who fed him as they got his half sister ready for school. Dylan would walk Maria down to the bus stop on Upper Byrdcliffe Road, chatting on the way to fellow father Bruce Dorfman, who lived next door and worked in a gray cube of a studio on Webster Road just below Hi Lo Ha. “It was after the accident, and he was getting ultrasound treatments for that,” Dorfman says. “He was walking with a cane.” Dylan dug the fact that Dorfman—a respected artist in his own right—wasn’t star-struck and didn’t particularly care that he was Bob Dylan. (Slightly more star-struck was Woodstock musician and fellow parent Billy Batson, a recent arrival in town. “We were all trying to live a ‘normal life’ and take care of our women and our kids and somehow do the music at the same time,” Batson said in 2010.)
Dylan didn’t even look like “Bob Dylan” anymore: he’d cut his hair and grown a sparse beard. The polka-dot shirts were stowed and old denim ones retrieved from the closet. He seemed to be walking away from the mind-expanding world of pop culture. “My sense was that he was trying to reclaim some way of incorporating his sense of family into his life,” Dorfman says. “He had an idea about some kind of middle-class life, and the closeness and comfort of family. He just doted on the kids. His relationship with Sara seemed to be a very, very husband-and-wife arrangement.”
When Dylan made moves to adopt Maria Lownds as his daughter, he asked Dorfman for a character reference. He also asked if he would teach him to paint, and so began making regular visits to the gray cube with either his giant poodle, Hamlet, or the even larger Buster, a St. Bernard that sometimes attacked Dorfman. “The paintings were terrible, but he did them and that was valuable,” Dorman says. “I remember him sitting in the studio and dwelling on his notoriety and the inner tension that came from it. He’d sit there and say, ‘I can’t understand it—all I am is an entertainer.’ I think he really believed that somehow, and it comforted him in some ways.”
THE IMPACT OF Dylan’s accident was felt keenly by the Hawks, who’d been expecting to tour with him and were now cooling their heels in the summer heat of Manhattan. “From 1960 to 1965 we’d played every night in clubs,” Rick Danko said. “We didn’t really know any better.” In limbo, the group killed time in the Village, where Robbie Robertson moved into a small apartment with his new French Canadian girlfriend Dominique Bourgeois and where the other three roomed together near Grossman’s home in Gramercy Park. (A regular hangout was Mickey Ruskin’s Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue South, where Dylan had held court.) Thanks to Grossman, the group recorded demos at Barry Feinstein’s photography studio on East Seventy-Third Street. “I suppose they were close enough for Albert to keep his eye on them from his office,” Feinstein remembered, though he never heard anything from the sessions till Robbie Robertson included Richard Manuel’s “Beautiful Thing” on the 2005 Band box set A Musical History.
“My wife and I gave Robbie and Dominique our old dishes and other household stuff,” Al Aronowitz said. “Robbie was very straight and charming and quite naïve.” Aronowitz even dragged Robertson to see his friends the Velvet Underground play as part of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable: “He stayed for about five minutes and then split. He couldn’t stand it.” To spare them from going back on the road, Dylan asked Grossman to put the Hawks on retainer. “It allowed us some freedom to figure out what an artist really is,” said Danko. “It got us out of that rut every night.”
Dylan went one better and invited the group up to Woodstock. “Robbie called me up one day and said, ‘What’s happenin’?’” he recalled. “And I said, ‘Nothin’.” He said he was in the mood for some nothin’ too.” Danko and Manuel were the first to arrive and quickly found themselves pressed into service in new scenes that Dylan and Alk were shooting for Eat the Document. The town was deep in snow but felt like home away from home to the two Ontarians. “We stayed at the Woodstock Motel for a couple of weeks,” Danko told me. “And then, country boy that I am, I just realized that ever since I had left Ontario I’d been living in cities. And I realized I didn’t have to be in cities anymore.” Through the motel’s owner, Bill Militello, he learned of a house for rent in nearby West Saugerties. “It was $125 a month,” he said. “It sat in the middle of a hundred acres and had a pond and mountains and a lot of privacy. So Garth, Richard, and myself ended up renting the house.” Robertson and Bourgeois followed shortly afterwards, fleeing the urban sleaze of the Velvet Underground for the clean air of the Catskills. Later that year they were married.
Big Pink, summer 1991 (Art Sperl)
Robertson was already enjoying preferential treatment from Grossman, who’d earmarked him as the one member of the Hawks with an interest in bettering himself. He was knocked out by the Striebel house, with its big kitchen and imported antiques. “The kitchen had a long counter with stools at it,” says Jonathan Taplin. “You’d go up there in the morning and have coffee with him and Robbie. Albert liked to kind of potter around, and he was a decent cook.” The guitarist was also keen to establish himself as Dylan’s new right-hand man, Bob Neuwirth having temporarily departed the scene to live in a commune. Intrigued by avant-garde cinema, Robertson volunteered his services to help with the completion of the film. He also mastered the art of the Dylan/Grossman freeze-out. “There was a whole thing with Bob and Robbie and Albert,” said Artie Traum, who stayed in Woodstock with his brother Happy that summer. “They had a way of coming into a room and really chilling it, just by being there and not saying anything. You’d say to yourself, ‘What’s going on here? Am I doing something wrong?’”
As the three less aspirational Hawks settled into the modestly sized home they nicknamed Big Pink, tucked at the end of a long dirt driveway, Dylan began seeing the value of having the group close by.** After a few get-togethers at Hi Lo Ha, he took to driving a baby-blue Mustang over to the pink house.†† Robertson would make his own way over from a small cottage Grossman had provided, and the five men would jam together in what Dylan remembered as “a typical basement, with pipes and a concrete floor, a washer-dryer.” “Before I realized it, Bob had been coming every day for six, seven days a week,” Danko told me. “It was part of his rehabilitation. He was getting stronger and feeling better.”
Happy Traum, who’d made a permanent move to Woodstock that summer, knew about the house but did not hear it referred to as Big Pink for some time. Says Jonathan Taplin, “nobody knew what was going on there or even really where it was.” Exceptions were made for pot dealers and pretty women. “We were dealing with men in their early twenties,” Robbie Robertson recalled. “Not so much for me or Bob, but the other guys would go into town and pick up chicks and come back and party all night long.”** Woodstock’s town supervisor, Jeremy Wilber—a former bartender whose unpublished 2013 novel Miles from Woodstock is an amusing snapshot of the town in the late sixties and seventies—remembers that the local young women had been surprisingly prudish. “When I left town in 1966, they were all virgins,” he says. “By the time I came back in ’68 the whole meadow was mowed.”
“My girlfriend was really sociable, so we’d go to Big Pink a lot,” says Graham “Monk” Blackburn, an English horn player who’d moved upstate after a period in New York City. “We just used to hang out, and as they gradually accumulated women, we became friends with all of them. Rick had inherited Hamlet, and the dog used to sleep in this big old Hudson he’d bought.”
“Hamlet and Bob weren’t getting along too well,” Danko remembered. “I pulled up one day, and it looked like Hamlet was trying to bite Bob on the ankle and Bob was trying to kick him in the ass.” Al Kooper remembers being woken at Hi Lo Ha by Dylan yelling, “No, Hamlet, no!” “He didn’t lead a very good Bob life,” Kooper adds. “He led a better Danko life.” Though Dylan had fallen out with Hamlet, he didn’t object to the poodle’s presence at Big Pink. “They were a kick to do,” he said of the basement sessions. “Fact, I’d do it all again. You know, that’s really the way to do a recording—in a peaceful, relaxed setting—in somebody’s basement. With the windows open . . . and a dog lying on the floor.”
Danko recalled Dylan showing up at noon most days and then splitting before six o’clock to be home for dinner. “If we were sleeping he’d get us up,” he said. “He’d make some noise or bang on the typewriter on the coffee table.” In Danko’s recollection, as many as “a hundred and fifty songs”—an exaggeration, though not far off—were taped in the basement of Big Pink between June and October. More than a few were cover versions of folk staples Dylan had known since his early Village days—Pete Seeger’s “Bells of Rhymney” and Brendan Behan’s “The Auld Triangle,” along with such traditionals as “Po’ Lazarus” and “Bonnie Ship the Diamond”—together with country songs by Hank Williams (“You Win Again”) and Johnny Cash (“Big River,” “Folsom Prison Blues”).
Though Dylan later said he didn’t know what people meant by the term, the ragged songbook that he and the Hawks assembled that summer was really the inception of the hybrid genre we now refer to as Americana. “Regardless of whatever’s been written about Bob and his creative genius, he’s basically a lover of American music,” says Larry Campbell, who played guitar and other string instruments in Dylan’s touring band between 1997 and 2004. “What the Band did behind him and what the band that I was in did behind him gave me an angle to look at folk music and how ubiquitous and how malleable it can be.”
“It was the kind of music that made you feel like you were part of something very, very special and nobody else was a part of it,” Dylan said of the songs. “And back then, it was hard to get to.” The basement tapes turned their back on the sixties and aimed toward the kind of old-timey ballads on Harry Smith’s hugely influential Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). Inspired by those songs, Dylan began writing new ones of his own. “Bob would sit at the window, and it was this perfect writing situation,” said Garth Hudson. “A couch, coffee table, a typewriter, two yellow legal pads with pencils, and he’d look out the window, and way off in the distance there were mountains. And he’d write.”
“I’d pick up a piece of paper on the kitchen table,” Rick Danko told me, “and I’d read, ‘My comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus / The poor old chauffeur was back in bed with a nose full of pus / Yea heavy and a bottle of bread.’ And I’d think, ‘Wow!’ We’d just go downstairs and play some chords, figure out some phrasing. Then Bob would come down, and we’d take it from there.” Though the basement was hardly conducive to good acoustics, recording went ahead on a reel-to-reel recorder that Richard Manuel had bought for $140. “Garth ran it,” Danko said, “and we had a little mixing board with maybe five inputs going into the two-track machine.”
As the five men played—and drank and smoked and howled with helpless laughter—the tumultuous events of the day unfolded in the background. “They seemed to be a million miles away,” Dylan said in 2014. “We weren’t really participating in any of that stuff where it was ‘the summer of love,’ but [sic] we weren’t there, so we did our thing. We wrote ‘Million Dollar Bash’ to go along with the summer of love.” Yet signs of the times were there nonetheless: as they had always done for Dylan, stories plucked from newspapers or television sparked ideas for songs. “You kind of look for ideas, and the TV would be on,” he said. “As the World Turns, Dark Shadows or something . . . just any old thing would create a beginning to a song, names out of phonebooks and things. When China first exploded that hydrogen bomb, that just kind of flashed across the headlines and newspapers . . . so we’d just go in and write ‘Tears of Rage.’ They were rioting in Rochester, New York, and that wasn’t that far away, so we wrote ‘Too Much of Nothing.’”
By turns lustily comic and hauntingly sad, Dylan’s new songs were funny and friendly after the frenzy of the 1965–1966 tours. Even the throwaway pieces were infectiously pleasurable. If “I’m Your Teenage Prayer” and “See Ya Later, Allen Ginsberg” were stoned goofs accompanied by uncontrollable giggles, Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds”** and the traditional “Young but Daily Growing” were clearly songs whose lyrics and melodies moved Dylan. And when he experimented with the “automatic singing” of “I’m Not There” or “Sign on the Cross”—a semi-tongue-in-cheek slice of country-gospel—the results were extraordinary.
For Dylan this music afforded a liberation, a diminution of ego through immersion in folk myth. “I didn’t have nothing to say about myself,” he said in 2014. “I didn’t figure anybody else would be interested anyway.” On bluesier numbers like “What’s It Gonna Be When It Comes Up” and “Dress It Up, Better Have It All,” he sounded as if he’d wandered into a half-empty blues lounge in 1964 to find the Hawks jamming there. “He was bringing it all back home, trying to get back to what it was that initially made him do music in the first place,” says Simone Felice, “before anything else was hanging in the balance, like money and prestige and fame, all that horseshit.”
When the wider world finally heard the basement tapes in the form of a 1975 double album released by Columbia, it was clear just how counterrevolutionary Dylan and the band had been. The man who’d inspired the hippie generation had become the ultimate anti-hippie. “Bob and the guys were like, ‘We don’t really wanna go to the Fillmore East every night,’” says Jonathan Taplin. “And I mean, Bob had three kids in four years.”
“When we began writing at Big Pink, we weren’t aware really of what was going on,” says Garth Hudson. “I remember hearing the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead on recordings, but we were over in the hills.” Worse than the psychedelic bands was the deafening sound of “heavy” groups like Cream. “While people were stacking up Marshall amps and blowing out their eardrums, we were down in the basement trying to get a balance,” said Rick Danko. “It wasn’t about one person trying to blow the others away, it was about trying to play together and find an economical common ground.”
One wonders what Albert Grossman made of the recordings from Big Pink: he must have thought his cash cow had deserted him, which was very possibly what Dylan intended. But by September it was evident that Dylan had actually written some of the catchiest songs of his career—songs with busy, chattering verses and gloriously open, almost hymnal choruses: “Million Dollar Bash,” “Lo and Behold!,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “Open the Door, Homer,” and “Nothing Was Delivered.” With Manuel he’d written the strange, tender “Tears of Rage”; with Danko the broodingly apocalyptic “This Wheel’s on Fire.” The six men even returned to songs such as “One Too Many Mornings” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” which suggests they were contemplating going back out on the road.
When Hudson was asked to copy ten of the best basement songs onto a seven-inch mono reel, Grossman copyrighted them in October. (Hudson added five more songs in December, Grossman copyrighting them in January 1968 and then distributing a Dwarf Music acetate of the tracks to various acts he managed—and several that he didn’t.) Peter, Paul & Mary recorded a cover of “Too Much of Nothing” that Peter Yarrow was ashamed of, but the Byrds cut wonderful versions of “Nothing Was Delivered” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” on their country-rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Julie Driscoll scored a UK hit with a powerful reading of “This Wheel’s on Fire” that brought Danko the first of what he called “checks from God.” Manfred Mann cut “Quinn the Eskimo” as “The Mighty Quinn” and the Box Tops did “I Shall Be Released”; Fairport Convention and Jonathan King (of all people) had stabs at “Million Dollar Bash.” McGuinness Flint included no less than seven basement songs on their 1972 album Lo and Behold. “It’s always interesting when somebody takes a song of yours and re-records it,” Dylan later reflected, “but these songs weren’t tailor-made for anybody. I just wrote when I felt like writing.”**
WHILE THE BASEMENT sessions continued and work slowed on Eat the Document, another “underground” was hatching within the Grossman camp, though without his direct involvement. In the spring of 1967 the Hawks found themselves sucked into You Are What You Eat, a pointlessly nonlinear documentary coproduced by Peter Yarrow and directed by Barry Feinstein.
Sprinkled with scenes of hippie kids cavorting at San Francisco’s Human Be-In, the film also featured Super Spade, a racially offensive cartoon dealer, and Clarence Schmidt, a real-life Woodstock eccentric who for twenty years had been creating extraordinary sculptural works that sprawled across a slope of Ohayo Mountain. (Unfounded rumor had it that some of the zanier basement songs—“Apple Suckling Tree,” “Even If It’s a Pig, Part Two”—were recorded chez Schmidt.) Even weirder than Schmidt was singer/ukulelist Herbert “Tiny Tim” Khaury, who’d been invited up to Woodstock by a fascinated Bob Dylan and who—backed by the Hawks—performed the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” in the film.
“It was going to be a documentary about the Hell’s Angels,” says John Simon, producer of the film’s soundtrack, which included songs by John Herald, Paul Butterfield, and Yarrow himself. “But then the Summer of Love happened, and they started filming people taking drugs. It’s brutal to watch.” Simon first came up to Woodstock that summer and met Howard Alk, who’d been hired to edit the film. “They put me in this house in Bearsville,” Simon says, “and told us to make a movie.” On Alk’s birthday they were at work on the film when a discordant noise came seeping through the windows. It was the four Hawks playing various instruments they clearly had not mastered, performing a stoned serenade for Alk.
A bright Princeton graduate who’d produced the Cyrkle’s 1966 smash hit “Red Rubber Ball,” Simon quickly bonded with Robertson. “Howard said, ‘These guys are right for each other,’” he says. “After I went back to the city, Robbie said, ‘Come on up.’ So we went over to Big Pink, and they played me stuff live that they were working on.” Simon’s timing was perfect. In the early fall, Levon Helm returned to the fold. The errant drummer had been in Texas with Kirby Pennick, whose Houston-based family made oil pump liners and rods, and the two men strolled around Big Pink as if they owned the place. “They were walking back out of the woods with big smiles on their faces,” says Simon. “Levon said, ‘Boy, ah like this place!’”
“I’d been lonesome for the band,” Helm told me. “I guess I believed that at some point we would get back together. I didn’t figure they would give up their dreams just to be Bob’s backup band.” In reality, he had been lured up to Woodstock by news that Grossman was in the process of landing the Hawks their own record deal. “I called Levon up and told him about the deal,” said Danko. “He said, ‘Well, I think it stinks, but I’m on my way!’ I said, ‘You need a ticket?’ and he said, ‘No, just pick me up at the airport!’ He came up to Woodstock, and I took him to Big Pink. I had a king-size bed, and he just walked in and moved into my bedroom.” Helm had been sorely missed. That Southern ingredient, welding blues and country together in one irresistibly swinging package, was the vital germ the Hawks needed if they were ever going to move beyond being supporting players for other people’s songs. “At Big Pink there were lots of late-night parties,” said Al Aronowitz. “They’d pass the guitar around, and Levon was always the star of the evening. He’d play the mandolin and sing great old songs like ‘Caldonia.’”
Helm’s presence at Big Pink signaled the end of the long summer idyll. Dylan knew that all good things must pass. As summer turned to fall, he was already moving into his next phase.
* Though it appears to sit on Zena Road, the address of Danko’s old house is actually 373 Chestnut Hill Road.
* This was the amazing forty-five-minute reel known as Something Is Happening, which I was lucky enough to see when I first visited Pennebaker in his Upper West Side office in 1991.
* Danko later claimed that Dylan had actually been pushed over by a young woman who was fed up with him revving the Triumph’s engine at a stop sign outside her house.
* Big Pink’s original address was 2188 Stoll Road. The house is now on Parnassus Road.
† Before The Basement Tapes there were sessions with the Hawks in the so-called Red Room at Hi Lo Ha. Recently discovered photographs from March 1967—of Dylan in a fur hat and white dungarees, Danko with a Fender Telecaster, and Manuel with Tiny Tim—may have been taken at Hi Lo Ha.
* Other visitors included the Bauls of Bengal, a group discovered in Calcutta by Sally Grossman. Around the time that two of their number appeared on the cover of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding—along with local carpenter/stonemason Charlie Joy—the Bauls were recorded by Garth Hudson in Big Pink’s basement, the result being the 1968 Buddah album The Bengali Bauls at Big Pink. “They had brought herbs from India and a chillum pipe,” says John Simon. “That was a new way of smoking for us.” In 1971, Sally hired Howard Alk to direct Luxman Baul’s Movie, a fifty-two-minute film about the group shot in West Bengal.
* Later covered by Neil Young, “Four Strong Winds” had been written by Tyson in the late summer of 1963, in a Lower East Side apartment that belonged to Albert Grossman.
* For the convoluted history of the basement tapes through their years of bootlegs, see Heylin, “What’s Reel & What Is Not.”